Well, I figured that I should take an opportunity to introduce a few opensource OSs that really haven't been in the lime light much. We all know about Linux and many of us also know about Darwin and BSD. Still some know about OpenSolaris. Which ever ones you know or don't here's a chance to get the scoop.

This version adds virtualization memory de-duplicacion, a rewrite of the writeback code which provides noticeable performance speedups, many important Btrfs improvements and speedups, ATI R600/R700 3D and KMS support and other graphic improvements, a CFQ low latency mode, tracing improvements including a "perf timechart" tool that tries to be a better bootchart, soft limits in the memory controller, support for the S+Core architecture, support for Intel Moorestown and its new firmware interface, run time power management support, and many other improvements and new drivers.

You've got to hand it to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: The man's never afraid to speak his mind. He may be wrong a lot of the time, like in 2007 when he laughed off the iPhone, or defended Vista before an irate user. Nevertheless, Redmond's bombastic boss is always entertaining.

As you may have seen from my recent posts I’m trying out OS X. There is no doubt that for the casual computer users viewpoint OS X kicks Linux’s ass. But I’m a open source computer programmer, and for us things are definitely not as clear cut. Five years ago, they probably would have been, but then Ubuntu arrived.

Recently Internetnews.com had a story that Canonical the company behind the Linux distribution Ubuntu, estimates that 8 million plus people use it’s popular operating system.

Many netbook computer buyers are still reluctant to "take a chance" on Linux rather than Windows XP. But which operating system is really the riskier choice for a netbook buyer?

Thomas Lord: «...The more urgent issue concerns the emerging W3C-based world: what will GNU have to offer there?» -- *

All of these [articles I've been reading lately] ignore one thing which is almost never stated: for a large majority of everyday computer users, people for whom a computer is just another tool or piece of technology, like a refrigerator or a widescreen TV, Windows is just fine.